According to my dad, who enlisted in 1959 and accepted his final discharge (from the reserves) in the late 1990’s, once a draftee made it as far as the reception station there weren’t many ways of getting out of service. Early discharges could be had on the basis of hardship, but these often carried some social stigma back home. Lots of guys had wives and kids but served anyway. The training cadre apparently operated under the presumption that failing any part of training was deliberate malingering. Various punishments, up to and including military prison, were among their options. As has already been mentioned, the other trainees were sometimes brutal in their treatment of somebody who wasn’t measuring up. Dad told me about one trainee who made a genuine suicide attempt. He got sent home, but carried a dishonorable discharge with him. He might as well have had a felony on his record, as his future civilian prospects were trashed.
Your experience was getting IN. Getting OUT might be quite different.
I was happily 2S until Tricky Dick stopped the draft, but the lack of any stories about ways to get out makes me think that md2000 has the answer. Maybe you could refuse to do push-ups, but anyone can run for a couple of hours while your platoon mates relax. It would pretty quickly get easier to give in. They’re teaching you how to kill - breaking you was probably not that hard. Especially if you want some sort of honorable discharge.
No personal experience, but a couple of guys told me they were dissuaded from such thoughts based on the peer pressure techniques described here.
Point taken. And, as noted this was a voluntary peacetime enlistment - not the draft era when requirements were probably relaxed. But the point is that if something as simple as a bee-sting allergy can disqualify one from service (not unreasonable, since it can be a life-threatening condition) there were probably several avenues open to someone seeking to avoid enlistment. I mentioned my uncle who dieted himself into a 4-F. Some people went the other way and ate themselves into obesity which served the same purpose. During the two world wars enlistees were routinely turned back for flat feet and hernias. If a person wanted to enlist, the people doing the intake physicals were probably willing to overlook a few things…as my recruiter did. But there were a number of technical disqualifications available to those who wished to use them.
So you’re on the deck of this carrier, and..LOOK OUT! HERE COME A SWARM OF BEES!!!
Sea Bees?
You’re making the (false) assumption that the peer pressure was limited to the psychological. As long as they did not kill you (or it could be made to look like an accident afterwards) there was a lot of leeway in group persuasion. It’s not like the drill sargent was going to tell them to stop it. (Wasn’t that the premise of “A Few Good Men”?)
As for acting gay - IIRC it was Biloxi Blues where the guy describes someone suspected of that behaviour - the MPs drove up to the troop while they were doing their daily run, picked the guy up “and we never saw or heard from him again.” And that does not mean discharged; actually physical acts of homosexuality while subject to military law were I’m sure subject to military discipline, and a few years in military prison may or may not be preferrrable to 'nam. It was one thing to be suspected of DADT, it’s another to be caught disgracing the proud yewneeform and have a judge in uniform decide what to do with you.
Back in the day when men were men and gays were fair game…
One of my Americorps teammates joined the Marines a few years ago. While she was in basic, one guy drowned. They did a test where their trainers put packs on their backs and threw them into a pool to see how well they swam. They think the guy was trying on purpose to fail and get kicked out, because he sank right to the bottom; usually people flailed around a bit, even if they couldn’t really swim. He drowned before they could drag him back up.
Another girl was “let go” (I have no idea how honorable or dishonorable it was) for generally failing at being a Marine. She was last in everything, dragging everyone else down, and wasn’t showing improvement.
I saw some old movie once about a guy who wet the bed in boot camp. They bunked him above the biggest, toughest guy in the platoon. Then they let him decide if it would be a good idea to indirectly pee on the guy in the lower bunk.
I was in the all-volunteer Army of the late 80’s/early 90’s. You could get out if you really wished, but it wasn’t easy. You had to consistently fail the skill qualifications or body fat critera, causing you to get repeatedly cycled back through part or all of basic until it became clear that you were a waste of government money. Nobody wants to spend more than 9 weeks in boot camp, especially a lazy slob, so that was enough motivation to prevent intentional sandbagging.
There were no mass punishments for actual skill failures, and therefore nothing like a “code red”… sure, there was plenty of extra PT for goofing off or being sloppy or dragging ass. But the guys who consistently failed at PT and marksmanship received discreet, intensive coaching on the side. I don’t mean ass-kicking either, it was more like nonstop rah-rah go-get-'em-tiger sort of stuff. Very few people are willing to have a drill sergeant be your constant shadow and companion every minute of the day, so there’s another disincentive to sandbag.
Finally I knew a guy whose family simply drove up to the barracks and took him home one night. It was an open post where anyone could drive right up to where we slept, the drill sergeants didn’t sleep in the same small building as us. So his family just drove up and he walked out and met them before the recruit on night watch could react. I asked a drill sergeant later what would happen to him, and in 1989 the answer was that after some sufficient period of absence he would get an administrative discharge, the same as if he had just failed boot camp. If they happened to catch him before then, he’d be back in boot camp. If he committed any crimes before being discharged then things might get complicated. But in that era, if you didn’t want the Army, then they didn’t want you.
Adminstrative discharge? What’s that? It’s called being AWOL (Absent WithOut Leave), and it’s a court martial offense.
Do the MPs run after you right away? No, because the longer you are gone, the greater the penalty. They’ve got your ass already, they prefer to make it hurt. You’re going to be caught eventually – a routine traffic stop, whatever – and by then the penalty is pretty heavy.
I was drafted into the Marines in 1969. There were several of us (draftees) in my boot camp platoon. I can’t say for sure whether anyone tried to BS their way out, but if they did success was not theirs. For what it may be worth, the Drill Instructors were graded, in part, and among other things, on graduation rates. Ergo, it wasn’t in their best interest to send recruits to the “fat farm” or otherwise see that they didn’t graduate. There was also pressure from within the platoon to perform.
Don’t know if this was the same case or not, but a couple years ago, here in San Diego, a drill instructor was court martialled w/regard to an incident where a recruit drowned.
I had a certified history of having had a spontaneous pneumothorax (a partially collapsed lung) and in spite of this history i was deemed eligible to be drafted. Rather than waiting for the draft notice i enlisted in the Navy. Midway though boot camp a doctor called me out one morning and asked how it was that i had been accepted for enlistment, given that history. I told him i had raised my right hand and had taken the oath and that was that. He immediately stuck me on sick call and had me assigned to a ‘survey’ detail. Two weeks later I was discharged and on my way home. When I reported back to the Draft Board I was once again classified as eligible for the draft. I kicked and screamed and made a real production out of it and was then reclassified as ‘1-Y’ which i think made me qualified as a hostage but not for active duty. The discharge i was given was for a preexisting condition. It was essentially an honorable discharge but it played hell with my employment status for quite some time. Basically I should have never been acceptable for either the draft or for voluntary enlistment; i learned that the Navy at that time discharged approximately twenty guys per week who shouldn’t have been eligible for enlistment for various reasons. That was in 1959 and I’m still pissed off about it.
Uh… no. An administrative discharge is exactly what it sounds like. They simply process some paperwork and then you’re no longer in the military. It is non-punitive, meaning there’s no court-martial involved, but you’d rather have an honorable discharge than an admin.
I assure you the MP’s do not let you get AWOL’er and AWOL’er by the day just so it can “hurt more”. If you have in the past served as JAG and you have other information, by all means please illuminate.
Not the draft, Navy bootcamp early 80’s.
Even in a volunteer force guys enlist and realize their mistake in bootcamp. Some of them tried to underperform their way out. Unfortunately the Navy’s solution for underperformers was to set them back. There was an official term for this but my memory isn’t producing it.
If you were in week 8 of 16 they could re-assign you to a company in week 4 for example. And they could do this multiple times thus increasing your misery. Eventually I suppose the recruit accepted a less-than-honorable and went on his way.
Some of these guys were overweight waivers who couldn’t reach the physical requirements. Most were personalities who clearly didn’t belong in the military. These included older 20-something I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-my-life recruits.
The flaw in the Navy’s strategy was that with every re-assignment more good recruits were exposed to a low-moral poorly motivated troublemaker.
Haven’t served in the JAG, but bunked in the same building with MPs. Not only was that part of our “why you don’t want to go AWOL” class instruction, but the MPs said they didn’t have time to bother with AWOLs that were only a few days old. “Let 'em be gone for a while, then we’ll fry their ass.”
I’d say that was pretty much empty boasting from the MP’s. During much of my dad’s lengthy time in the Army and Army Reserves, he was first sergeant in a paperwork unit. They processed a lot of people out of the service. Once the fun n’ games in Vietnam came to a close and the draft was no more, “administrative discharges” and “general discharges” became the norm for pretty much everything short of crimes that would have landed you prison time if you did it as a civilian. He was a cop in civilian life and a pretty hard-ass guy in general, so this didn’t necessarily sit well with him, but it was how things were done.
I was in boot camp in 1981. We called it “recycling”, but that wasn’t the official term either.